Eight states are sending autistic, mentally retarded, and emotionally troubled kids to a facility that punishes them with painful electric shocks. How many times do you have to zap a child before it's torture?

A Virginia middle school teacher recently forced his students to support President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign by conducting opposition research in class against the Republican presidential candidates.

The amount Americans owe on student loans is far higher than earlier estimates and could lead some consumers to postpone buying homes, potentially slowing the housing recovery, officials said. Total student debt outstanding surpassed $1 trillion late

The Brits are banning best friends. British school teachers are encouraged to discourage children from having a "best" friend so that the children don't have to deal with "the pain of splitting up from their best friend."

Ten years have passed since President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), making it the educational law of the land. A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broad

Back in September we noted a peculiar RFP by the Fed which sought to become a secret 'big brother' to the social media world, and to "monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria."

A Minnesota middle school student, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, is suing her school district over a search of her Facebook and e-mail accounts by school employees.
The 12-year-old sixth grade student, identified in court

In most cases, those clients could not meet the federal hardship standards that are necessary to discharge a student loan through bankruptcy. Many of these parents who co-signed the student loans face the prospect of losing their life savings, cars o

It's spring-time in the Sonoran Desert, and as la maravilla of the wild flowers stretches across the valleys of southern Arizona, caravans of literary heroes and national education advocates will be descending on the Old Pueblo this weekend for a ser

When McDonald’s and other fast-food chains announced last month that the infamous “pink slime” was no longer being used in their burgers, some thought the ammonium hydroxide-treated beef cuts had disappeared from our food supply once and for all.

Like a horror-film villain, "pink slime"—the cheeky nickname for scraps of slaughtered cow that have been pulverized, defatted, subjected to ammonia steam to kill pathogens, and congealed into a filler for ground beef—takes a pounding but keeps comin

The University of Colorado overstepped its authority when the school's board of regents imposed a ban on the carrying of concealed weapons at its four campuses, the state's Supreme Court ruled on Monday.
In overturning the policy, the court said t

One Friday afternoon in December, leaders of a tax-funded elementary school called Life Force Arts and Technology Academy shepherded students into a Scientology church in Tampa’s Ybor Square. The children were fed candy and pizza, given Scientology b

Drs. Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson, senior fellows at the Hoover Institution, looked at the performance of our youngsters compared with their counterparts in other nations, in their Newsweek article, “Why Can’t American Students Compete?” (Aug. 28,

We teach limited government under a constitution that secures unalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This first right means that one’s life cannot be taken by tyrannical government.

As many Rethinking Schools readers know, in January Tucson school officials ordered our book Rethinking Columbus removed from Mexican American Studies classes, as part of their move to shut down the program.

Many school districts are switching to electronic payment systems in their cafeterias. Parents can fund their kids' accounts online and even see what their kids are buying for lunch. But kids can also charge food when there's no money in their accoun